It’s a Full Sensory Experience at Ori’s Bakery and Café

Sometimes you can just tell when a star is born. Ori’s Bakery and Cafe is a shining example of a new business bursting onto the scene with its finger on the pulse of the community, ready to hit the ground running.

Ori’s is a family-owned bakery and cafe owned by husband-and-wife team Ori and Tom Reed. But make no mistake, the star of the show is Ori.

"Oh, heck yes,” Tom Reed, a retired CFO, laughs. Tom is handling the numbers end of the business. "Who wants to know an accountant? I mean, I'm an accountant by trade.”

It doesn’t take long to see that Ori has a firm grasp of everything else needed to make Ori’s an instant success on Marco Island. Ori’s is located at the former Cocomo’s Grill location at 945 N. Collier Blvd.

Of course, the most important thing is the food. Ori’s is definitely a case of what you see is what you get. It’s a full sensory experience coming to Ori's, where not only do you see the restaurant itself and the counters, but you get to watch the food being prepared. You get to hear the food being prepared, and you get to smell the preparation. So when a pastry comes out of the oven, it's an unmistakable aroma. And it’s the same with a pie or a cake. Customers will be able to get an all-encompassing feel for the restaurant. It’s definitely not a walk-in, grab it and go operation.

"We're hoping that people enjoy the open environment that we have here,” said Tom, who has crunched every conceivable number to make sure Ori’s will be a financial success. "The way we've designed this, there's nothing hidden. The only thing that's hidden is the dishwasher.”

“We're trying to make it a full visceral experience,” said Ori. "You can kind of see, sense, feel, touch, talk, you know, and kind of become more of the community. We want to kind of be more embracive of the community and what they want to see and touch. And besides, if there's something you don't like, we actually want to hear about it.”

“The beauty of it is when you're standing at the register, you can watch it being made,” Tom said. "I don't know of anywhere else on Marco that you can do that. If you want to see pastries being made and you think they're made on a machine, you know, mass-produced, you're absolutely going to see a dough sheet. You're going to see a person folding it and you're going to see the exact process."

Ori is a native of Argentina, where she started baking at 15.

"I have my aunt that has my three little cousins,” she said, “and for birthdays, she will bake everything from the cake to the eclairs. And I started helping her. And I like baking. So I started making desserts. And my dad's side of the family is Italian. So my grandma used to bake a lot too. So it's like I've been getting recipes from a couple different cultures.”

Ori said she has literally “hundreds” of recipes she wants to introduce to her Marco Island clientele.

Tom is that unusual commodity - an account with mad people skills. He will be at the front of the house. A coffee aficionado, he’s turned the old Cocomo’s bar into an over-the-top coffee bar.

"I am a little bit of a coffee nut,” he said, "I really love coffee. A good coffee is actually hard to get in most places. And no offense to anyone, it's often not the caliber of coffee that we would want to have. Lavazza, which is our primary brand, is very fresh and we will make it very consistently. And that's the goal, to have something you absolutely want to have in your style. To me, it's really about the consistency of the roast. We also picked Lavazza because we are Argentinians with Italian influence. We like coffee too, and we like espresso coffees and cappuccinos. We have a full espresso bar.”

"I'm an accountant by trade,” Tom said. "I'm a CPA in Illinois and have done anything from entry-level cost accounting clear through to CFO and have grown companies from start to my largest one that sold for $860 million. So I have a lot of experience in business. We'll call it retired, although I'm working way harder now than I ever did. But this is a lot of fun to do together and to combine my ability to get financing and to cost out the products and to cost out everything so we know what it costs to make every item in here and we know what we think we should be able to sell it for and what our competition is selling it for and feel very comfortable about that. You're going to get an item that’s worth what you’re paying for it. And if we didn't feel that way, we wouldn't do it. So we won't pick items that are losers, and we won't pick items that we can't put our name on and feel comfortable that it's going to be high quality. In the end, we really want to create a product that people want to come and get and want to pay an appropriate price for because it is handmade.”

Ori’s will be serving breakfast, lunch, and dinner. One of the non-bakery items that is sure to be a hit is their Italian beef sandwich. Ori worked at the famous Portillo’s in Chicago, a restaurant famous for Italian beef. She actually learned under Dick Portillo, who started Portillos in 1963 and built it into a franchise with more than 70 locations across several states.

“He started with a cart selling on the street,” Ori said of Portillo. "And now he has a fortune. He sold the company when I was working for them. He was really nice. I learned a lot there, but my heart was in baking.”

Ori wants her bakery to become a community gathering place. A place where customers become friends.

"I like to know my customers,” Ori said. "I like to say, 'Hey, Bob, how are you? How was your trip? Long time no see.' I like to know their names and I like to see them come back and say, 'Oh, I miss you. Where were you?’"

Being Argentinian, empanadas will be a staple at Ori’s. Each one is stamped with Ori’s name.

"I highly recommend her barbecue or slow-roasted barbecue pulled pork empanada,” Tom said. 

“Empanadas may be something Latin or Argentinian,” Ori said, "but each country puts their own twist, you know. I make American flavors for the empanadas. You have breakfast with bacon, egg and cheese empanadas. That is something that an Argentinian will never buy, you know, because we don't eat eggs for breakfast or bacon.”

Ori’s will use the fast-casual model.

“This is fast casual,” Ori Reed said, "because it's made with quality, but you just walk in, order, and sit down. It’s fun.”